About e-Luminate Festival

The 2018 Festival took place from 9 - 14 February.

Light seamlessly crosses both Art and Science, and the e-Luminate Cambridge Festival is a celebration of the infinite possibilities created by this intersection.

e-Luminate Cambridge is a contemporary arts festival for a city at the forefront of scientific and technological research. Our event offers a unique opportunity for residents and visitors to discover the richness and diversity of Cambridge’s iconic buildings and public spaces in a new light.

Light collides with the imagination of participants, connecting science, technology and arts through a series of installations, activities, talks and concerts.

Why Light?

Light is about life – without light there is no life. The Light of the sun fills us with a sense of tranquillity. The same happens with Light art: we find a space for contemplation or just an absorbing view, and it makes us feel enriched. In art Light becomes matter and redefines space and time. The exhibitions at the Festival evoke the ambivalence of Light, its numerous meanings and facets. Clearly, the Festival does not exhaust the vast field of questions posed by contemporary artists on these concepts. However, it encourages the visitors to explore their path between the opposite polarities of light and darkness, day and night, reality and illusion.

e-Luminate Cambridge & Art

Since artists are naturally interested in the way that we see the world, they have long been fascinated by the science of light. Through an exploration of the infinite ways that light can be reinterpreted and represented to us, the e-Luminate Cambridge Festival acts as the ideal platform for discussions on the science that inspires and underpins art in unexpected ways.

e-Luminate Cambridge has been at the forefront of this vibrant and expanding area of artistic practice, called Light Art, promoting innovation through its support of some of the most exciting figures on the contemporary scene.

Since 2013, the Festival has commissioned and produced, in collaboration with technical partners Hawthorn and Light Motif, nearly 50 different projects, ranging from ambitious projection mapping to smaller light art pieces.

The organisers are proud to have worked with upcoming new artists such as Antonin Fourneau, Susie Olczak and Lorna McNeil and we hope to be able to expand our commissions in the coming editions of the Festival.

e-Luminate Cambridge & Technology

The e-Luminate Cambridge Festival promotes environmentally sound technologies and showcases some of the recent advances in light related technology, research methods and manufacturing. These technologies are sometimes referred at as low carbon, energy efficient, and cleantech; generally, light technologies are grouped under the photonics industry banner.

The UK photonics industry is worth £10.5 billion to the economy which is almost as much as the pharmaceutical industry generates. There are about 1.5K firms working in this industry in the UK and they employ 70K people.